Empery by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Read Free Book Online

persuaded the skeptics, as it had the Survey brass, that the story he told was not fantasy, however fantastic.
    But the things that Wells wanted most to find, even needed to find, simply were not there. There were no details about the Mizari, no glimpse of their world or even themselves, no hint of what moved them or, even more importantly, what their vulnerabilities might be. Not trusting the task to anyone else, Wells had plowed his way through more than two thirds of the documents in a search for even a handful of clues about the Mizari.
    He had not found even one.
    Farlad’s flagnote for Jiadur’s Wake indicated that it had been written after Thackery’s retirement and represented the last contact between the Service and the one time Director of the Survey Branch. When Thackery had offered the text to the Earthnet for distribution, they had routinely referred it to the Committee for clearance. Clearance had been summarily denied—and rightly so, Wells saw immediately—on grounds of executive privilege and internal security. It began:
I am Merritt Thackery. If you think you know me, you do not. I have seen the videos of my life, and it was not so. The creators of those images grafted the places and faces of my life onto another person, a stronger, more self-confident person, a person who might well have been due the acclaim that I have accrued. That person was admirable, even heroic, and his story entertaining. But it was not me, and it was not my story.
    When I returned to Earth, I was asked what I did, and I told them. I was asked what I saw, and I told them. But I was never asked what I felt, and when I offered it myself, there was little interest. Somehow that was deemed not worthy of study, or thought too subjective to be trustworthy. What they wanted, and therefore what they got, was the testimony of a witness, not the experiences of a man.
    So the story that the Service eventually released, and the creative talents of the Nets transmogrified, was but the skeleton of truth, lacking the sinew of emotion to animate it, the tissue of humanity to smooth over the awkward joints. The truth is this: What I did could have been done as well by another. And there have been times when I wished that it had been.
    If you prefer your histories simple and your heroes untarnished, read no farther. But if you prefer the truth, whatever shape it takes, then read on, for it is for you that I have written this.
    Farlad was right—I’ve found you at last , Wells thought with satisfaction. He touched the com key. “Ronina.”
    “I’m here, sweet. Will you be long?” She answered in video mode, posing before the terminal in a translucent cat suit that revealed creamy white skin down nearly to her nipples and hid very little elsewhere. But even that sight was insufficient inducement to change his mind. “Go home. I won’t be coming back to the apartment, after all,” he said, and cued forward to the first chapter.

Chapter 3
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Sword
    It was nearly four in the morning when Wells finished reading. He had moved from the desk to a couch and traded the fixed terminal for a hand-held slate. His eyes were weary, and when he set the slate aside, he dimmed the room’s lights for their sake. But he was nowhere near sleep, for his mind was full of what he had just read.
    The tone of the manuscript was mocking, cynical, almost embittered. Despite it, or perhaps because of it, Jiadur’s Wake sang, and Wells had found himself drawn in.
    Though not strictly chronological, most of the first half of the text dealt with the early history of the Service, beginning with the Reunion of Earth with its daughter world, Journa, and continuing through the Revision, which had closed out the Phase II explorations in which Thackery had taken part.
    His portrait of the Service was blunt and unflattering, pointing up the flaws and foibles of both the organization as a whole and the individuals who comprised it. But he was no more kind to himself.